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"In 1993, I would have been telling you that it was all the army," says Morse. "But it wasn't."

Blame has just been passing from scapegoat to scapegoat.

"We got rid of (dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc") Duvalier. We got rid of the army because it was repressive. We dealt with the police. We dealt with the electoral process, we got rid of (former president Jean-Bertrand) Aristide, all these people.

"We change everything, and it's still not working."

Which had led Morse to, possibly for him, an awkward conclusion.

When U.S. president Bill Clinton came to Haiti in 2003, he met with Morse at the Oloffson. Clinton asked Morse how long he'd been in the country. Morse replied: "22 governments."

He now has no interest in counting.

"There's an economic group behind these front people and if you keep throwing away the front people, nothing changes."

You don't get to the central problem, which for Morse means the iron grip of a dozen or so super-rich families who've essentially run Haiti as their fief for decades.

"They like it when they have stuff, but nobody else has stuff."

By some estimates, the lion's share of the country's resources is controlled by just 1 per cent of the population, the wealthy few with homes here and mansions in Miami.

It's an equation that has scarcely changed since the days when variously repressive Haitian regimes were being propped up by the United States as Cold War bulwarks against communism.

"There's a relationship, here and in Washington, that has not been addressed," says Morse. "I'm saying that over 20 years, we've dealt with a, b, c, d and e, and now we have to deal with f, which is the families."

Morse is an unlikely, reluctant activist. Now 52 and the son of an American history professor (Yale) and a Haitian dancer (also Yale, School of Drama), he was comfortably raised in Connecticut.

A Princeton grad in a long line of same, Morse came to Haiti in 1985 in search of musical inspiration.

He was soon fronting the Haitian band RAM (named after his own initials) and, in due course, leasing the Hotel Oloffson, which, being the Oloffson, meant that Morse also became custodian of a legacy that still resonates.

Built in 1896 as a private mansion, the Oloffson is a gingerbread fantasia of turrets, towers and cupolas.

It only became a hotel in the 1930s, after the occupying American army had used it as a hospital, and its grounds are now strewn with statues of sundry voodoo characters, not least Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit of cemeteries, keeping watch from a brick alcove.

By the 1950s, the Oloffson had become the city's bohemian centre of music, art and intellectual life, a place tolerated by the original Duvalier dictatorship of "Papa Doc" precisely because the international celebrities it attracted lent a kind of legitimacy to the regime.

The rooms are all named after their most famous guests, so you end up with a hillside annex where actress Ann-Margret falls about halfway between former U.S presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and Charles Addams, the New Yorker cartoonist who based his portraits of haunted mansions on the Oloffson.

It was while staying here that Graham Greene wrote much of The Comedians, whose protagonist, Brown, owns a scarcely veiled version of the place.

It's a novel about whether, amid the absurd twists and cruelties of life, you end up being a self-preserving observer of the fray, a committed fighter against overwhelming odds, or something uncomfortably in between.

On Jan. 16, at 4:30 in the morning, Morse issued a brief note on Twitter, the latest in a series of tweets he'd been sending since the earthquake struck four days earlier.

They'd ranged, as written then, from the chilling to the relieved – from "tremor! " and "death all around" to "My mom just showed up at the Oloffson ... sigh of relief! "

By the 16th, he was noting: "when the sky is filled with planes and copters, it reminds me of the 2 invasions we had. it's different now. such suffering. Ppl buried alive ..."

The next dispatch, the one at 4:30, simply read: "WHO'S IN CHARGE?"

On one of those sticky Haitian days when it seems as if the ceiling fans are the ones doing the futile tilting, the same question is put to Morse.

This he mulls, until he finally says, "Nope," as if he would love to give a simple answer, point a relieved finger, but finally admits he can't.

For Morse, there is instead a tangle of answers, whose common themes are the long-standing relationships between Haiti's ruling families, and their connections in the United States.

It also happens to be a kind of no-go zone.

There was a time, says Morse, when U.S. Pentagon operatives would seek him out, solicit his views and impressions. Since the earthquake, and Morse's more stridently political tweets and website articles, that time has passed.

"Once I started telling them that we had to deal with the families, everyone disappeared."

His new role, as conscience or provocateur, is not one he sought.

"I didn't come to Haiti to say, `eat the rich.' I came here to make music. I didn't come here for social upheaval or politics or anything. I came here to make music, and we're still making music, but we've been through a lot. I've been through a lot."

Will that ever end?

"It is bleak," says Morse. "But if it was completely bleak, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

"They're following me on Twitter, so I'm not alone. I've got 13,000 people following me."

There is, he thinks, some hope in that.

"I felt, before the earthquake that I call Samson, that I had lost my battle for change in Haiti. Samson makes it seem like we're going into extra innings."

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